Blockchain for enterprise

2017 saw a major rise in awareness by the general public of blockchain-enabled cryptocurrencies. While cryptocurrencies and ICOs have grabbed headlines, they’re best seen as a technique built on blockchain’s foundation — which is about collaboration and agreement across companies and individuals. As businesses increase their understanding of the technology, they recognize business scenarios where blockchain can remove inefficiency, add transparency, and promote direct collaboration.

All blockchain and distributed ledger technologies balance trust, performance and confidentiality to enable multiple parties to work together. Understanding the tradeoffs made by different protocols is fundamental to determining which best apply to requirements of specific scenarios, either to make its use of blockchain more efficient, or sometimes to make blockchain the right approach.

The problem of trust

The main goal of blockchain systems is to address the problem of multi-party trust. Two organizations may be able to dramatically improve their joint business through collaboration, but they often struggle to work together efficiently because they don’t feel they can completely trust each other. For example, banks currently rely on trusted intermediaries to handle inter-bank payments, reconciliation, and other processes.

Rather than use intermediaries to broker trust, blockchain creates trust with technology, which is both more efficient and scalable than the traditional labor-intensive approaches. Blockchain networks combine a variety of cryptographic and distributed systems algorithms with financial incentives that promote good behavior, incentives that are often supported by cryptocurrency. The resulting systems give participants confidence that the information they see on the network is genuine and is the same that all other participants see. That shared source of truth removes the chief obstacle that companies face in multi-party processes and collaboration today, cutting out middle-men and speeding business processes on top of a secure foundation.

The challenge of confidentiality

While many enterprises are excited by blockchain’s ability to streamline business processes that involve multiple parties, they don’t want sensitive data used in transactions with one party to be exposed to other, uninvolved parties. That concern is especially pronounced for business processes that are heavily regulated, and many cases can dramatically raise the complexity of a blockchain solution, or rule blockchain out altogether.

Confidentiality presents several challenges to blockchain implementations, mainly because of the mechanism on which public blockchain networks base their security. For example, when a user publishes a contract a blockchain network like Ethereum, every machine in the network must be able to execute the contract’s code to validate its adherence to the network’s rules and to verify the resulting output. In a completely trustless environment like a public network this is a reliable way for keeping each machine on the network honest. However, this approach doesn’t help with confidentiality, since all information is available to every participant on the network.

Enhancing Confidentiality

Although the original blockchain protocols rely upon data transparency to operate securely, innovations in applied cryptography have made it possible to run code on a blockchain network without revealing the data it processes. These solutions can provide confidentiality for public blockchain networks because they are designed for decentralized, trustless environments. For example, the cryptocurrency Z-Cash uses zero-knowledge proofs to shield the sender and receiver of a transaction. While these techniques show promise, current implementations are complicated to implement, slow and resource-intensive, limiting the scenarios to which they can be applied.

Other approaches to confidentiality in blockchain networks are partial ledger visibility and state channels. In these techniques, only the parties of a contract can see and validate the correctness of transactions that affect them. While the rest of the consortium members can’t access the underlying data, they can attest that any parties affected by a transaction have signed off on the changes that it makes. Ledgers like Corda, Quorum, Ripple and Parity use partial ledger visibility or state channels. A downside to these techniques is that private transactions are more easily corrupted than transactions on fully transparent ledgers, since not all consortium participants validate every transaction. Another is that they often require parties to commit resources to a confidential relationship, preventing them from being used in other transactions.

Trusted execution environments

Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) are another technology that can provide confidentiality.TEEs are like black boxes, where nothing outside the box can see the data being processed inside, or tamper with the code that’s processing the data. In the context of a business process, like one executed on a blockchain, TEEs are like an incorruptible third-party, whose actions are agreed upon in advance by all the network participants. Last August, we announced the Microsoft Coco Framework for Blockchain, an open-source technology that can give blockchain networks confidentiality and performance, while reducing complexity and limitations. The Coco Framework for Blockchain is showing promise for enterprise blockchain scenarios.

Road ahead

As the market matures, businesses are increasingly looking beyond cryptocurrencies to see the true value that blockchain-based systems can deliver for their multi-party business processes. As a result, we expect a growth in production blockchain systems launched this year, and with advances in blockchain confidentiality and performance technologies, to spread into more business processes. Those applications and networks will balance trust, performance and confidentiality to drive a digital transformation both inside and between industries, and we’re excited to help our customers capitalize on that wave.

Definitions

Personal Data – any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person.Processing – any operation or set of operations which is performed on Personal Data or on sets of Personal Data.Data subject – a natural person whose Personal Data is being Processed.Child – a natural person under 16 years of age.We/us (either capitalized or not)

Processing is limited to the purpose. Our Processing activities fit the purpose for which Personal Data was gathered.

Processing is done with minimal data. We only gather and Process the minimal amount of Personal Data required for any purpose.

Processing is limited with a time period. We will not store your personal data for longer than needed.

We will do our best to ensure the accuracy of data.

We will do our best to ensure the integrity and confidentiality of data.

Data Subject’s rights

The Data Subject has the following rights:

Right to information – meaning you have to right to know whether your Personal Data is being processed; what data is gathered, from where it is obtained and why and by whom it is processed.

Right to access – meaning you have the right to access the data collected from/about you. This includes your right to request and obtain a copy of your Personal Data gathered.

Right to rectification – meaning you have the right to request rectification or erasure of your Personal Data that is inaccurate or incomplete.

Right to erasure – meaning in certain circumstances you can request for your Personal Data to be erased from our records.

Right to restrict processing – meaning where certain conditions apply, you have the right to restrict the Processing of your Personal Data.

Right to object to processing – meaning in certain cases you have the right to object to Processing of your Personal Data, for example in the case of direct marketing.

Right to object to automated Processing – meaning you have the right to object to automated Processing, including profiling; and not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated Processing. This right you can exercise whenever there is an outcome of the profiling that produces legal effects concerning or significantly affecting you.

Right to data portability – you have the right to obtain your Personal Data in a machine-readable format or if it is feasible, as a direct transfer from one Processor to another.

Right to lodge a complaint – in the event that we refuse your request under the Rights of Access, we will provide you with a reason as to why. If you are not satisfied with the way your request has been handled please contact us.

Right for the help of supervisory authority – meaning you have the right for the help of a supervisory authority and the right for other legal remedies such as claiming damages.

Right to withdraw consent – you have the right withdraw any given consent for Processing of your Personal Data.

Data we gather

Information you have provided us with
This might be your e-mail address, name, billing address, home address etc – mainly information that is necessary for delivering you a product/service or to enhance your customer experience with us. We save the information you provide us with in order for you to comment or perform other activities on the website. This information includes, for example, your name and e-mail address.

Information automatically collected about you
This includes information that is automatically stored by cookies and other session tools. For example, your shopping cart information, your IP address, your shopping history (if there is any) etc. This information is used to improve your customer experience. When you use our services or look at the contents of our website, your activities may be logged.

Information from our partners
We gather information from our trusted partners with confirmation that they have legal grounds to share that information with us. This is either information you have provided them directly with or that they have gathered about you on other legal grounds. See the list of our partners here.

Publicly available information
We might gather information about you that is publicly available.

How we use your Personal Data

We use your Personal Data in order to:

provide our service to you. This includes for example registering your account; providing you with other products and services that you have requested; providing you with promotional items at your request and communicating with you in relation to those products and services; communicating and interacting with you; and notifying you of changes to any services.

enhance your customer experience;

fulfil an obligation under law or contract;

We use your Personal Data on legitimate grounds and/or with your Consent.

On the grounds of entering into a contract or fulfilling contractual obligations, we Process your Personal Data for the following purposes:

to identify you;

to provide you a service or to send/offer you a product;

to communicate either for sales or invoicing;

On the ground of legitimate interest, we Process your Personal Data for the following purposes:

We Process your Personal Data in order to fulfil obligation rising from law and/or use your Personal Data for options provided by law. We reserve the right to anonymise Personal Data gathered and to use any such data. We will use data outside the scope of this Policy only when it is anonymised. We save your billing information and other information gathered about you for as long as needed for accounting purposes or other obligations deriving from law, but not longer than 1 year.

We might process your Personal Data for additional purposes that are not mentioned here, but are compatible with the original purpose for which the data was gathered. To do this, we will ensure that:

the link between purposes, context and nature of Personal Data is suitable for further Processing;

the further Processing would not harm your interests and

there would be appropriate safeguard for Processing.

We will inform you of any further Processing and purposes.

Who else can access your Personal Data

We do not share your Personal Data with strangers. Personal Data about you is in some cases provided to our trusted partners in order to either make providing the service to you possible or to enhance your customer experience. We share your data with:

Our processing partners:

facebook.com

google.com

bing.com

twitter.com

pinterest.com

Our business partners:

facebook.com

google.com

bing.com

twitter.com

pinterest.com

Connected third parties:

facebook.com

google.com

bing.com

twitter.com

pinterest.com

We only work with Processing partners who are able to ensure adequate level of protection to your Personal Data. We disclose your Personal Data to third parties or public officials when we are legally obliged to do so. We might disclose your Personal Data to third parties if you have consented to it or if there are other legal grounds for it.

How we secure your data

We do our best to keep your Personal Data safe. We use safe protocols for communication and transferring data (such as HTTPS). We use anonymising and pseudonymising where suitable. We monitor our systems for possible vulnerabilities and attacks.

Even though we try our best we can not guarantee the security of information. However, we promise to notify suitable authorities of data breaches. We will also notify you if there is a threat to your rights or interests. We will do everything we reasonably can to prevent security breaches and to assist authorities should any breaches occur.

If you have an account with us, note that you have to keep your username and password secret.

Children

We do not intend to collect or knowingly collect information from children. We do not target children with our services.

Cookies and other technologies we use

We use cookies and/or similar technologies to analyse customer behaviour, administer the website, track users’ movements, and to collect information about users. This is done in order to personalize and enhance your experience with us.

A cookie is a tiny text file stored on your computer. Cookies store information that is used to help make sites work. Only we can access the cookies created by our website. You can control your cookies at the browser level. Choosing to disable cookies may hinder your use of certain functions.

We use cookies for the following purposes:

Necessary cookies – these cookies are required for you to be able to use some important features on our website, such as logging in. These cookies don’t collect any personal information.

Functionality cookies – these cookies provide functionality that makes using our service more convenient and makes providing more personalised features possible. For example, they might remember your name and e-mail in comment forms so you don’t have to re-enter this information next time when commenting.

Analytics cookies – these cookies are used to track the use and performance of our website and services

Advertising cookies – these cookies are used to deliver advertisements that are relevant to you and to your interests. In addition, they are used to limit the number of times you see an advertisement. They are usually placed to the website by advertising networks with the website operator’s permission. These cookies remember that you have visited a website and this information is shared with other organisations such as advertisers. Often targeting or advertising cookies will be linked to site functionality provided by the other organisation.

We use Google Analytics to measure traffic on our website. Google has their own Privacy Policy which you can review here. If you’d like to opt out of tracking by Google Analytics, visit the Google Analytics opt-out page.

Contact Information

Changes to this Privacy Policy

We reserve the right to make change to this Privacy Policy.

You can configure your Internet browser, by changing its options, to stop accepting cookies completely or to prompt you before accepting a cookie from the website you visit. If you do not accept cookies, however, you may not be able to use all portions of the WideBitcoin Websites or all functionality of the Services.

Please note that disabling these technologies may interfere with the performance and features of the Services.

You may also disable cookies on the WideBitcoin Sites by modifying your settings here:

Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.

Last Update: May 25, 2018

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